Elon Musk: I, for one, welcome our new pasty overlord

Sulla said his aim was to free Rome from tyrants. He murdered thousands. Elon wants a Sulla. CyberSmith is Elon

SpaceX is poised to dominate the industry but they are betting on Starship for the future. Elon tried to shoot them in the foot and may have succeeded.

Someone pulled the thread.

Just noticed you need to view on phone, not desktop. They have to fix that asap.

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Suing the best law firm in the country doesn’t seem like a good use of resources.

lol this guy is such a fucking loser

Upon seeing the magnitude of the fees being presented for the board’s approval, one former Twitter director immediately exclaimed in an email reply to Edgett:

O

My

Freaking

God

Despite any initial shock, Twitter’s lame duck board members voted to approve Wachtell’s excessive and unconscionable fee.

I interpreted that response in the complete opposite sense, as in “OMFG, we only have to pay 0.2% of the $44 billion this idiot is handing us to close the deal?”

Except it comes out of the money left in the firm. Not the 44 bill paid for buying the firm.

That’s why Musk is so cranky.

I mean many firms could have won that case and the success fee was hardly necessary. I’d put it on the former directors for failing to get a reasonable price on a firm to handle the litigation. That said, the firm got exactly the result Twitter wanted (for the 40 billion deal to go through), so it was a pretty massive success.

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I read that Stockton Rush wanted to be the Elon Musk of the sea. Little did he know that Elon wanted to be Stockton Rush.

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And now we have Threads. Meta clearly dusted off their “kill Snapchat” playbook to launch it because, just as they did with ephemeral stories in 2016, Meta has taken the surface-level components of a competitor’s platform and ported them over to their network and retrofitted them to run on their algorithm. Comparing Meta to the Borg from Star Trek implies a level of sophistication I don’t think they deserve. Comedy writer Jason O. Gilbert came closer to nailing it, writing this week that, “Threads feels like when a local restaurant you enjoy opens a location in an airport.”

My verdict: Threads sucks shit. It has no purpose. It is for no one. It launched as a content graveyard and will assuredly only become more of one over time. It’s iFunny for people who miss The Ellen Show . It has a distinct celebrities-making-videos-during-COVID-lockdown vibe. It feels like a 90s-themed office party organized by a human resources department. And my theory, after staring into its dark heart for several days, is that it was never meant to “beat” Twitter — regardless of what Zuckerberg has been tweeting. Threads’ true purpose was to act as a fresh coat of paint for Instagram’s code in the hopes it might make the network relevant again. And Threads is also proof that Meta, even after all these years, still has no other ambition aside from scale.

Some nice tidbits. The most active page on Facebook is a livestream of Bingo and the most shared image is that of a potato with the text that you have to share it to have good luck

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Sure - I agree with that. It definitely is odd that the board agreed to such a big fee after the litigation was resolved.

It’s just going to be a very hard case to win (not sure the exact standard, but I’d presume that the court will give tons of deference to decisions made by the board, even if their interests were not aligned with the future of Twitter), and it’s only going to be harder as you’re going up against some of the best litigators in the country. I checked and Musk got a boutique litigation firm that seems decent but not top notch - most likely because no big law firms would ever take the case as they are all pretty chummy with each other.

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It’s interesting case of what are the fiduciary obligations of Twitters management as the case was being decided. If it was to their current shareholders then pursuing the litigation while sticking the future owners with the bill and minimizing the cost if they lose (by making a big success fee) seems right.

Good question is, what are the odds Musk tries to stiff his current lawyers?

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I agree, threads is unpolished and is nowhere near what it needs to be to finish off twitter now. But is there really any reason to believe it’s going to stay that way? If it’s just a joke vanity project for Zuck then yeah, maybe, but Zuck has stockholders to answer to now. I just don’t see it not massively improving.

Not really. He still has the majority voting power so he controls the board and can pretty much do whatever he wants. Shareholders don’t really have any recourse against him. We saw this with the billions spent on the Metaverse.

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Bills are sent monthly and the lawyers will withdraw if not paid. The funky situation with the Twitter suit is that it involved the new owners paying the lawyers who just beat them, so immediate payment was likely covered in the retention agreement.